


Rest

by sunshinestealer



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Beforus, Dream Bubbles, F/M, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-28
Updated: 2015-01-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 10:09:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3245729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinestealer/pseuds/sunshinestealer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meulin muses on her relationship with Kurloz in the dream bubbles.</p>
<p>(Gen fic, with mentions of mind control and Kurloz's more sinister practices.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rest

It has been billions of years in the dream bubbles following the failure of your session. Or, at least, it’s an estimate if you were still counting. When you’re not exploring the vivid memories conjured up by the dream bubbles, you stay in this hub world, a cluster of hives, lawn rings and lily pads. Most days, everyone comes outside to socialise. There’s only so many days you can wallow in your recuperacoon, pretending to lull your dead body into a sleeping state devoid of dreams. There are also so many days you can spend as a miserable wreck curled up on a pile, tears slipping down the side of your face and soaking into the fabric as your mind endeavoured to repeat every single awful memory of your life, both before and during the session.

Everyone shed their final tears for this fate long ago.

Coping mechanisms varied from troll to troll. Horuss and Aranea threw themselves into learning. Captor and Pyrope spend their days cuddled up to each other or trying to outdo each other with “rad” skateboard tricks. Sometimes they go indoors and load up the game grub containing fifty different save files of _Troll Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater_.

Elaborating on the others would be tedious. It’s quite sad, actually, considering how much life in these dream bubbles has fractured their minds. Cronus is still of the belief that he can get a date by being an ‘arrogant asshole’ and complaining to anybody who will humour his rants about ‘dumb broads.’ (Not that it’s even a phrase that was _used_ on Beforus, but Cronus is still of the delusion that, through some grand cosmic joke, his spirit was placed into an insectoid alien, far removed both temporally and spatially from the planet he claims is his own.)  

You’ve been trying to write an interesting piece on this melancholy for a while though. Of course, as most of your friend fics go, there’s always a happy ending. Some ray of sunshine who comes in with the offer of a pale or red relationship. Aranea has told you to try and stop using the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Troll’ trope in your writing, but you like it. Plus, she can beta your stories all she likes, you’re not going to make that many edits.

Sitting under your favourite tree, you cast your gaze over the rest of the trolls down the hill. Rufioh is milling around with Horuss, heading towards the forest. You giggle quietly to yourself at what that could entail. Damara is nowhere to be seen, and Kankri and Porrim are arguing over something. Likely the touchy subject of troll feminism.

When his bony hands settle on your shoulders, you can’t help but let out a little squeak. Kurloz likes that, apparently, because he gives you a little pat on the head and settles down beside you.

Silence passes for a little while. You’re both content to observe whatever’s going on in the world below you. Maybe later you’ll abscond to the lily pads, where it’s even quieter.

You take in Kurloz’s frame beside you. He’s leaning in closer, eager to siphon some of your midblood heat. Kurloz, as you learned from your intimate encounters, has a genetic condition that makes him seem so tall and gangly. As a Highblood, however, he is not slated for culling the way that you would be in the same situation. His arm span is longer than his height, his hands are large with long, pianist’s fingers and his circulation is poor. There’s a dip in his chest near his vascular pump, and his joints are incredibly flexible — he likes to do contortions as his party trick. Not that you have many parties any more.

Still, you lean in and kiss his cheek, content to simply be together. Even if you are ex-matesprits, and it sometimes wounds you terribly to think of your previous relationship. How it will never be the same again. How you will always have this wedge between you… even if he tries his best to make it all okay. 

You still have terrors of seeing him kneeling over a mirror with a needle and wire, insistent on showing his contrition to the Messiahs for an unforgivable sin. Your limbs pinned to your sides by his powers, unable to do anything as your matesprit silenced himself forever.

You swallow down your fears and put a hand through his curly hair, careful not to agitate any knots. You are both… rather averse to hairbrushes.

He allows you to comb his hair lightly, and you giggle as you pull out a few blossoms. He gets your attention and signs: _RUFIOH INVITED ME ALL UP INTO THE TREES. AGAIN._

This makes you giggle. They’d be an awfully cute couple, if Rufioh didn’t have two obsessive partners orbiting around him. Rufioh can pick up languages, as evidenced by his stumbling Troll Japanese when he first introduced Damara to the group, and he is originally from a Troll Spanish-influenced region of Beforus, with the accent to prove it. Kurloz can slowly teach him, sign by sign, the same way you taught each other. Maybe you’ll write a fic about it. 

After a while, you grow bored of people watching. Kankri and Porrim seem to finish their debate, and walk off back towards their shared hive. 

By now, you’ve curled up in his lap. There’s no romance there any more. You two are just comfortable enough with each other to hold these wordless conversations. An onlooker might consider these gestures to be pale — but you know that Kurloz wouldn’t define it as such. He already has Mituna for when he needs feelings jams.

And you now have Horuss. Which you never thought would happen in a million years. But somehow, you’re completely pacified by each other’s presence. You don’t even mind if your hand gets a little sweaty in his after a while.

Your fingers trace along the delicate bones in his face. Kurloz has always appeared gaunt, but you know from experience during your session that his angular frame hides some incredible strength. He’s set aside his juggling clubs and trapeze for now, though.

He exhales through his nose. You lean up, twisting yourself around to sit between his legs, kneeling upwards to pull him into your embrace. It’s wrong. You should not be together. Fate pushed you apart by the accident, and continues to push you apart. The way your gut twists when you think of him, the way you want to avoid him but can’t, magnetically attracted to this troll who wishes to bring forth a new apocalypse. Who claws into the minds of non-believers, his sermons resounding in their minds until they _want_ to believe in the cult, and are willing to be his puppets.

You’ve tried to avert your eyes from his on many an occasion. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly bad mood, he would grip your chin and force you to stare directly into the pink and purple light show. Nowadays, he’s a lot more gentle with trying to slip past your defences, feeding religious doctrine and his holy orders into your mind, whilst inducing a form of spiritual euphoria that kept you pliant and willing to listen to his commands.

But, after coming around from this state, you could never remember what had happened, most of the time. You could vaguely recall snippets of your psychic conversations with the highblood, and how they would usually trigger a newfound sense of purpose. Something you knew you _had_ to do, your body going on autopilot.

Kurloz’s eyes aren’t flickering dangerously rightly now. They remain a clear marble white, and he sighs again, holding one of your hands tightly. Your hand strokes along his chin, a claw lightly catching on the wire. He winces.

You slip your hand out of his grip and sit back, to slowly sign. _Tea? Round my place?_

Kurloz gives a thumbs up. You head back down the hill, your beanpole of an ex trailing behind. As far as you can tell, there’s no more work that needs to be done to appease Kurloz’s idols. He hasn’t locked himself away in a spiritual fervour for a while now. Well, that you know of. 

He’s just… normal. The way he used to be in the early days of the session. He had still been raised to follow the faith, but was less zealous about it. He could even crack jokes about some of the rituals. But now, his beliefs were set in stone, and he despaired for the souls of the damned who had not opened their eyes and their ears to the Dark Carnival.

He couldn’t proselytise or convert _everybody_ in this limbo, however. He could make certain that the few in his inner circle would be spared when the time came, but otherwise, the knowledge would be closed off.

He hadn’t taught you nearly as many of the stories that lay in the thick, leather-bound tome on a cushioned pedestal in his hive. He promised to tell them to you when the right time came, but he had been hesitant to do so when you announced you were writing fan-fiction about the relationship between two lesser angels.

_“What? Troll John Milton wrote fan-fiction about Jegus, didn’t he?”_

You giggle quietly at the memory. There’s a curtain of small animal bones over the entrance to your hive, rattling in the breeze like a wind chime. A memento to your younger self, who positively adored hunting, and would wear these bones for decoration. Your fashion must have caught on, going by Rufioh’s dress sense.

You push the curtain apart, inviting Kurloz in. You have no real need for warmth any more, but you still keep your fire lit, deep inside the heart of the cave system. Your shipping chart is a little outdated, but you’ve started to procrastinate a lot since dying. No need to keep them current, since your group has had all the time in the world to try making moves on each other, and it’d be foolish to erase a perfectly good shipping chart based on one rumoured flirtation. 

Kurloz slumps down on a pile of animal hides with you, just willing to cuddle for now. Maybe later you’ll flick on your television. It repeats the same programmes that the satellites broadcasted the day of your ‘deaths’. Sometimes it’s amusing to look over an old repeated sitcom and challenge each other to quote the episode word for word.

But for now, you just rest against each other. 


End file.
